When I think of “divisive” games, it doesn’t take long for me to start dwelling on modern Fire Emblem. Putting aside Shadows of Valentia due to its remake status, the last decade of FE is the definition of controversial. Understanding the context of how the series was saved from complete obscurity by Awakening, it’s obvious why IS would prefer to keep appealing to the people who like that style of game, but the tension this creates between old and new fans is one that continually arises with every new release. This tension skyrocketed to new heights with the success of Heroes, a game which seemed to completely concede to depravity with the ability to spend large sums of money gacha rolling for child-like characters in bridal outfits or swimsuits. Fire Emblem’s reputation as a series for degenerate weeaboos seems almost justified at this point, and I totally sympathise with any fan of the old games who looks upon the new ones with revulsion and a dejected, fatalistic acceptance that this is just what Fire Emblem is now.

As a (belated) anniversary game, however, Engage is interesting because it has brought all of that tension to the forefront. Engage simultaneously wants to be a celebration of the old games, yet also has its feet planted firmly in the practices of modern FE and wants to appeal to those people too, the result is something deeply confused yet revealing about the state of this series. In many ways, people like me are the target audience of Engage; people who have played all of the games and get all of the references, and while Leif and Sigurd’s paralogues did succeed at effecting a warm feeling inside me, there’s also something deeply misguided about the premise of Engage. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who felt a profound sadness upon first watching this game’s reveal trailer; I do not think there is a more efficient way to communicate that you have no interesting ideas for a new story than simply bringing back all of the protagonists of the old games into one big nostalgia-trip. The last thing I want from this series is to be pandered to, but for as much as the premise of this game seems to be for people like me, the truth of the matter is that the premise of this game is equally to pander to the ‘untapped market’ of Heroes players who know these characters not from their original games, but from their gacha incarnations, and convert those mobile consumers into main series ones. Between summoning main characters, rolling for minor stat rings, the “Tower of Trials” being similar to Aether Raids, and skills + inheritance ripped straight from Heroes (You’re not fooling anyone by renaming Desperation to “Alacrity”, IS), it’s very clear that this game wishes to bring the Heroes players into the fold.

The presence of the Emblems in the story is pointedly awkward, again, in a way which is very revealing about the internal tensions of contemporary FE. There is little elaboration on what being an Emblem actually means. The circumstances of how they were summoned to this world are never explained, and the details on whether the Emblems wanted to be summoned, whether they miss their homeworlds, whether they enjoy being a ghost etc. are kept sparse and never explored. The result is the cumbersome presence of twelve characters who occupy a strange space in-between a real person and a MacGuffin to be collected. The premise of Emblems fails to be interesting for the simple fact that divorced from their circumstances and battles, the protagonists of this series have always been generic do-gooders with white bread personalities, and so taking them away from the contexts that made their stories interesting could never work. Not to get too pretentious, but there is something deeply hauntological about the very literal dead ghosts of this franchise’s past hovering silently in the background as they powerlessly witness one of the worst video game stories unfold before their eyes, it’s an almost too-good-to-be-true metaphor for the direction the series has taken.

My original intention was to avoid writing about the story. It is not exactly hard to just recognize the entire thing as trash and move on. Unfortunately, I’ve seen a worrying number of attempts to paint it as good or at the very least enjoyably “campy” or “silly”. I’m sure most of these perspectives come from weeaboos and are therefore immediately disposable but for the sake of my sanity I’m going to go through the motions and actually talk about why I hate the story so much. It would be all-too-easy to just point to the pure cringe that is this game’s main theme and every scene it plays in, but the writing on display features much deeper flaws.

Undoubtedly the worst tendency of modern FE is the self-insert ‘avatar’ characters. Alear is probably the worst of them all, that is saying a lot when Corrin is your competition. I say this because Alear is literally God. This game’s cast do not just figuratively, but literally worship Alear, bringing the sycophantic coddling of the player character to comedic heights. Alear is the quintessential insufferable anime protagonist, constantly apologising over things they blatantly can’t control, universally loved despite being a charisma-less dweeb, always prattling on about the “strength of their bonds” and how much trust they have in their companions and bending the plot such that they never face consequences (reminder that Alear dies and is resurrected three fucking times through the course of the whole story). Alear is a vacuum around which the rest of the game contorts itself to escape but never can; everything revolves around them and it all gets brought down to their level.

Another grating Fates-ism present in this story is the focus on royals and their retainers, two categories in which almost every single character in the roster falls into. Experience has shown that the characters in these games only have capacity for two or three character traits at a time and having one of those already taken up by “likes their lord” results in less interesting characters. Much of the game is devoted to touring these kingdoms and there is almost no worldbuilding to speak of, we know that Solm is open-minded and Brodia is militaristic but it never goes any deeper than this. Sombron seems to desire “sovereign blood” but it is never explained why, because it is a thinly veiled excuse to centre the plot around this small group of characters. FE has always had a problem with the illusion of mass-scale war but Engage doesn’t even try. The scattered remarks about how “war is so awful” fall flat because nothing about the narrative reinforces the conflict involving people outside a small group of plot-important characters.

While I haven't delved into most supports yet, I can't help but feel like a lot of these character archetypes are lifted directly from recent games: Panette is basically Charlotte in that she hides her violent nature with the trappings of noble etiquette, Fogado is basically Claude in that he is a prince who hides his diligence beneath an easygoing veneer, Alcryst is basically Bernadetta in that he's an archer with non-existent self-confidence who fears all social interaction, Vander is every Jagen character, Etie is just Effie, Chloe and Bunet are just the generic "I like food" characters again. I could go on, and I wont pretend like there aren't little nuances beyond these descriptions, but it demonstrates the limitations of designing characters around a small quantity of identifiable character traits and tropes; eventually you just run out of gimmicks and repeat the old ones.

Villains are Garon-tier, but somehow even worse due to the pathetic attempts the game makes to redeem them. Sombron is an embarrassing cartoon villain enough as it is but the real offenders are the Four Hounds and Veyle. The former fight, lose, and retreat from you so many times (I counted 7) that it is genuinely laughable and transparently reveals that characters only die when the plot arbitrarily decides it wants them to. Veyle has to do her Jekyll-Hyde routine where her eyes literally turn red and she becomes evil such that the game can instantly dispense with any consequences for her actions because “that wasn’t her”. The game thinking it can elicit sympathy for the Four Hounds by chucking in a sob story as they’re dying despite the fact that these people literally burnt down an entire village of innocent people just to annoy Alear is so tonally dissonant it makes me genuinely worry whether the writers or their supposed audience even understand what tier of morally bad that kind of atrocity is actually in. The villains of this game have causes and goals so obviously immoral that almost all of them admit how stupid their plans are upon being defeated, Sombron included.

There is much, much more to nitpick about this story but those three are the biggest broad strokes for me. I’d much rather write about gameplay at this point because this is what I actually enjoyed about this game.

It is preferable to have good gameplay and a bad story than the reverse; this alone is what has kept Conquest as a relevant game and the rule applies to Engage too. I found myself enjoying the gameplay here even more than Conquest, in fact. I think it takes the guiding design philosophy of Three Houses - that being the idea that giving the player fun and incredibly strong tools takes precedence over balance considerations - and perfects that philosophy. Emblem rings are perhaps the most satisfying array of strategic tools any FE game has conjured up. There is nothing that compares to the satisfaction of moving 14 tiles with Sigurd and nuking a whole line of cavaliers, warping across the map with Celica and deleting an armour knight, immobilising an entire block of enemies with Corrin, lining up that 4-way dance with Byleth, sniping a flier across the map and stacking speed buffs to ridiculous degrees with Lyn, baiting a whole enemy squad into a Great Aether zone, or my personal favourite, warping and rescuing 5 units at a time across the whole map with Micaiah. The creativity in combining these strategies along with a dancer, combine that with some incredibly good combat animations and all things considered, the result is some of the most fun I have ever had in an FE game, that is a considerable feat.

The mechanics aren’t just fun, they’re pretty well considered too. One particularly great addition is unit types, which feels like IS finally understanding how to balance high-move fliers and cavaliers against foot units: Backup units are a great tool against the bosses or high-dodge units and consistently make themselves useful, Covert units are also strong with their absurd terrain dodge bonuses, Qi Adepts also make themselves useful with chain guard, which is invaluable for avoiding enemy phase one-shots on Maddening. In typical FE fashion, the one failure is armour knights, who still remain useless due to being locked to 4-move, but still manage to be useful in the early game with their break immunity.

Weapon engraving is inspired. It extends the uniqueness of Emblem rings to weapons too and allows even more synergy within unit builds. Admittedly, there are some choices so obvious they make themselves; I put almost every engrave that gives more crit on a killer weapon, for instance, but even here the system combines in great ways with the other mechanics

Skill inheritance is also a deeply rewarding system, allowing a great level of creativity in building units. Granted, it is not perfect, as some skills dominate a lot more than others, most notably Canter, Momentum, Speedtaker and Dual Assist, but there are still other viable/cheaper options like Resolve, Hit +15, Avoid +10/15 and so on. These options are very fun to experiment with and you can create some insane builds. In my game I had a Berserker with Resolve and 80+ HP who was just insanely tanky, a backup unit with dual assist who would add chip damage to my whole team just by standing vaguely near them, and a speedtaker swordmaster with a Micaiah-engraved sword that was basically impossible to hit, all of these felt like results of my own ingenuity on what I thought would be strong and it felt like I was genuinely rewarded for experimenting with the game’s systems. The only real problem I have here is that higher bond levels are much too expensive, lvl5 -> lvl10 costing 1500 bond fragments, which is ridiculously high and that’s not even close to the lvl20 cap.

It needs to be said that with this system one of the oddities with Engage rears its head, that being the separation of power between units joining early and those that join late. Not only are those later units much more powerful in terms of base stats, they also join with much more SP, due to the low gain rate, making them doubly good. To reinforce the point even more, the balancing of personal skills is terrible. Many of the early units have useless crap like Etie’s +2 strength when using an item or Clanne’s +10 hit only when next to Alear, which are comically terrible, compared to later units like Rosado’s frequently useful -20 avoid for male enemies or Hortensia’s incredibly good +1 staff range. I am conflicted about this facet of the game. On the one hand, it makes leaving early game units permanently dead a viable option, which is good. Yet on the other hand, it makes it relatively pointless to try sticking with those early game units, which seems limiting in what team compositions are worth using. This is the inverse of the series norm, where it’s usually worth sticking with early units if you’ve kept them alive, but again, I’m conflicted on whether this change is good or bad - Ironmans are fun!

One of the pleasant surprises of the gameplay is that Alear is actually not broken, which felt like it was inevitable after Kris, Robin, Corrin and Byleth were all incredibly dominant in their games. On a more general level the difficulty curve and tuning on both Hard and Maddening are pretty good, at no point does the game feel too easy or impossibly hard and it always feels like you need to think about what to do, but have the tools to win regardless. I am still not much of a fan of how many rewinds you get in these games but that is a forgivable offence. I am also not going to comment on map design as I’ve come to the conclusion after many years that “good map design” is very subjective, though there are undoubtedly bad maps here, especially in Solm (ch. 12, 13, and 15 are all crap in my opinion).

You may get the impression from all of this that Engage is a pretty cut-and-dry game; the gameplay is good and the story is bad. This is mostly true, but it’s a frequent occurrence in art that individual elements often bleed into one-another, and the deeply confused premise I spoke of earlier also infects the gameplay; I am of course talking about Somniel, which many, many others have already identified as a black stain on the gameplay.

Somniel is awful. It is worse than you think it is. Somniel feels like a direct way to spite players seeking to play optimally by bogging them down with asinine busywork. The most egregious are clearly ring polishing and the workout routine, both of which are genuinely putrid, and the proliferation of crap lying on the ground that the game begs you to pick up also demonstrates a disrespect of the player’s time. I think the most irritating decision, however, is the absolutely baffling one to put both the arena and the inheritance menu in their own areas, behind loading screens which can take over 10 seconds. These are fundamental functions and, along with the smithy, should be available from the world map and preps screen. Somniel is the ultimate demonstration that the tensions inherent in this series cannot help but infect the gameplay too. Somniel is trying to appeal to both of those fanbases by replicating the social-sim emphasis of the Three Houses monastery while also being a hub for gameplay systems. The result is that both are half-assed and both audiences will be disappointed; the modern fans because Somniel is a hollow shell of the monastery’s integration with the story and the classic fans because Somniel is just more loading screens and grating busywork getting in the way of the core mechanics.

Somniel takes a sledgehammer to the game’s replayability. As much as I want to delve back into this game for another Maddening run with different units, I know I probably won't because doing so means spending hours of my ever-shortening life running around picking up silver ore that my adopted dogs have dug up, or sitting through excessive loading screens, or playing even more fucking fishing minigames so I can scrape together more bond fragments to actually make the build I want. It seems dramatic but Somniel is symptomatic of the fact that modern FE is incapable of being as simple as “good gameplay bad story”, the conflicting design goals can never amount to something so straightforward. My review of this will accompany a score and that score might even be positive but nothing quantifiable can really express the amalgamation of contradictory feelings modern FE games conjure up in me nowadays. It’s a blend of being absorbing and enjoyable yet also deeply depressing and full of wasted potential.

I'm mixed at best.

Overall, I think the gameplay is solid. I think Break is an excellent mechanic that encourages aggression on the part of the player and makes the game's combat player-phase focused. The Engage effects are really flashy, really cool and really interesting - if a bit overpowered (Sigurd's effect is pretty bonkers, especially combined with Chloe which gives her a ridiculous amount of movement). Whilst I don't think there's an astounding map in Engage akin to Conquest Chapter 10, many of the maps in the early and mid game are very good, with the highlight being Chapter 11 in my view.

That being said, though Engage's gameplay is an improvement over Echoes and Three Houses, I absolutely wouldn't say it has the best gameplay in the series. In particular, I think Conquest overall has better balance by virtue of not having the Engage effects be so powerful, and whilst the early and mid game's map designs are good, I think that outside of the (admittedly great) final boss, Engage's map design deteriorates significantly in the late game. Out of the last 10 maps, I think there are only two maps with meaningful side objectives (in Chapters 19 and 20) and one additional anti-turtling incentive (via a time limit in Chapter 24) - and many of the late game maps feel like open fields without much in the way of interesting terrain - to the point where I'd argue that if it wasn't for Engage's core mechanics, most of the late game maps aren't any better than those of Three Houses.

My biggest issue with Engage's plot is there is nothing that is at all compelling. There's nothing that is compelling enough to really hook players in and leave a lasting impression on them either. None of the game's emotional beats manage to hit particularly well and nothing the game presents has provoked any kind of thought. Whilst Fire Emblem has had its share of simple stories in the past, no story in the series has been this incredibly shallow. I would be perfectly fine with a simple story (Sacred Stones is one of my favorite games in the series because of how well it is executed) - but Engage isn't the next Sacred Stones. If anything, it's the next Birthright in how poor the story's execution is despite how little the story attempts to do.

The dialogue is abysmal - characters at times feel like they were written by aliens who read about how humans talk in a book. This, I would argue, worsens the game's incessant avatar pandering. Whilst avatar pandering has been an issue with every Fire Emblem game since Awakening, it has never been this blatant.

Another minor issue with Engage's plot that may have been forgivable if it was attached to a more interesting story is its tonal inconsistencies. Whilst I wouldn't have had that much of an issue if Engage had committed to being a more comedic Fire Emblem game (and the first few chapters are by far the best for this reason) - there are countless moments where the game wants me to take it seriously, and because of how jarring this is compared to the silly anime hijinks that fill the rest of Engage's plot, none of these moments land.

Whilst Engage is not supposed to be a groundbreaking plot, given that it is clearly an anniversary title, I also have to note the sheer unoriginality of Engage's plot - to the point where certain late-game plot points are flat out ripped from Fates.

Engage's plot really suffers in its pacing. Because it tries to rush players from plot point to plot point without giving the player time reflect upon events or actually showing the backstories of certain characters, nothing in Engage that resembles an emotional moment feels at all earned. Of particular note is Lumera's second death in Chapter 25 where she gets revived and dies in the span of one chapter just like Mikoto did in Revelation and which my response basically was "At least Mikoto had the decency to not drag out her death for five minutes". Compare this with Lyon where there are numerous cutscenes in Sacred Stones showing his backstory and humanizing him well before he is ever fought, or even Emmeryn or Jeralt's deaths, which occur far later in the plot that that of Lumera's and after the point where you've grown attached to these characters.

I haven't even gotten to the contrivances yet - and there's a lot of contrivances attached to Engage's plot. Key plot points seem to be driven by events that come out of completely nowhere. Most notable of which are the Chapter 10-11 sequence where Veyle magically steals your time crystal out of nowhere, or the Chapter 21-22 sequence where Sombron suddenly appears out of completely nowhere, only for Alear to begin fading despite the fact that the game never hints that Corrupted die after summoning Emblems only for Veyle to try to revive Alear and fail despite successfully doing so in the previous cutscene only for Alear to get revived out of nowhere by the other twelve Emblems revive them out of completely nowhere due to some sort of thousand year miracle (which they could have done the first time Alear got killed) that the writers were clearly making up as they went along - it's a contrivance on top of a contrivance on top of a contrivance.

All of these issues wouldn't be particularly problematic if they were attached to a more interesting story. The problem with Engage's plot is that very little works particularly well. It's an aggressively mediocre plot even on paper - and as such, all of these minor issues ultimately drags this story down from a serviceable plot to one that is barely better than Fates. Even Awakening, for all of the issues with its plot, managed to have some highlights in its story which Engage just doesn't have.

In my view, the character writing of Fire Emblem is arguably the most essential aspect of the series. In this stead, Engage's character writing isn't just a very noticeable step down from Three Houses (which admittedly was always going to be a very tough act to follow), but outright mediocre at best even when taken on its own merits.

On paper, Alear is a serviceable character. They're like Shez in that they're goofy and charming (albeit maybe a bit less charming), and their suggestion to run early on is a highlight of their character. The problem I have with them, however, are twofold: the constant avatar pandering which I mentioned above, and their presence in the story.

Alear has the same issue with Corrin in that they are the only protagonist in the game. In Awakening and Three Houses, having a bland avatar, whilst still problematic, wasn't as detrimental to the plot because there were other, far more compelling lords in these games which drove the plot. The problem with Engage, though, is that since Alear has no supporting protagonist, the story requires them to be a compelling character in their own right to hold up the story - and unfortunately, whilst Alear can be charming at times, they are not a compelling character at all. The only remotely interesting aspect to their characterization is the fact that they are Sombron's child - which gets resolved in Chapter 20 immediately after it gets brought up. It isn't even brought up in their supports despite the fact that Veyle being part Fell Dragon is brought up in her supports. It's a shame, especially coming off of the two most compelling lords in the series in Edelgard and Dimitri.

I don't like Sombron as an antagonist either. He has the same issue as the Agarthans in that whilst there's something to his character, it's let down completely by the fact that most of his presentation shows him doing generically evil things. Whilst the writers wanted him to be sympathetic to an extent given his motive rant in the final chapter and in his backstory, because he isn't humanized at all, it falls completely flat. Just a scene or two where he does do good things would have worked wonders for his character.

The side characters are a massive mixed bag at best. To its credit, I feel that Engage's cast has a little more to them than that of Awakening or Fates' casts, and there's no character that's quite as offensively awful as Peri or Camilla. That being said, I think Engage's cast is presented horribly. Almost all of the C supports and even most of the B supports revolve around each character's gimmicks or is needless fluff, and very little that is particularly enlightening is brought up at all. Whilst this wasn't something that was particularly noticeable when the game leaked and I first read the supports, it's feels outright grating when I'm actually playing the game and I can't just read all of the supports at once. The A supports are much better in this regard, but even these supports aren't at all exceptional. Even the more meaningful supports feel contradictory and incohesive - compare Diamant making a bit deal about how he has to be better than his predecessors and resist his people's temptation to wage war with his support with Framme and his support with Alfred where he all but admits that he will be willing to wage war if his people demand it, making him look downright cowardly. Or how Celine makes a big deal about doing anything to protect Firene but gleefully helping Mauvier without any hesitation despite the fact that Mauvier destroyed a city in Firene and never apologizes for it - apparently she only cares about named characters in Firene?

My biggest criticism of Engage's cast is that for one reason or another (i.e. maybe Engage's worldbuilding isn't particularly deep), many of the characters don't feel like they are grounded in the world they live in. As a result, many of the characters don't have a cohesive worldview that they can use in interactions with other characters, which I think the Tellius games and Three Houses did really well. For an example, Alfred trains a lot because according to his support with Celine, he has an old illness and he doesn't want his allies to see this weakness of his. Compare this to Jill from Path of Radiance, who initially is racist due to the systemic racism within Daein, or Dorothea from Three Houses, who is desperate to marry a rich noble due to her unstable childhood as a result of Fodlan's classism. The latter two are characters whose writing wouldn't make sense outside of the world they exist in - whereas Alfred (and most of Engage's cast, for that matter) feel like they could be in any other game in the series and not much would change.

The characters of Engage also feel far too idealized. While I don't think every character needs to be outwardly flawed, so many of Engage's cast feels generically nice that the cast begins to feel outright interchangeable. Almost every character interaction has the characters in question acting polite and friendly towards each other. Because of this, there is very little room for the drama, misunderstanding, character growth or ideological disagreements that are required to make a character compelling - and just because Engage's characters are nice people don't mean that there isn't any room for such drama or disagreements to occur (Dorothea's support with Ferdinand and Mercedes' support with Sylvain are excellent examples of this despite the fact that Dorothea and Mercedes are kind people). Hence, there is nothing in Engage's character writing that is nearly as memorable as Jill having to grapple with her racism, or Marianne finding her will to live, or Lysithea grappling with her own mortality, and that's simply a shame.

It's not all bad, though. In particular, there are some standout characters that do have some compelling character interactions. In particular, Ivy is a real highlight because it feels like the worldbuilding of Elusia was very carefully considered when the writers were designing her character. The fact that she's a worshipper of the Divine Dragon makes sense because she's had poor experiences with the fact that Elusia worships the Fell Dragon, and as a result, she changed religions in secret. Similarly, the fact's that she's very distrustful can both be attributed by both her mistreatment within the Elusian court and her mistreatment at the hands of the Fell Dragon's worshippers. In this stead, she genuinely feels like a Tellius or Three Houses character in that her worldview and personality traits are informed by her place in the world. Similarly, whilst Veyle has a similar backstory to Alear in that she is part Fell Dragon, this fact is meaningfully brought up in her supports, and she is a far stronger character as a result.

Overall, it's exactly what I expected from all of the trailers - good gameplay, but really poor storytelling and characters.